Childhoods in More Just Worlds

“This is a timely and important book. The contributions take up the critical task of inquiring into what it might look like to centre justice in the worlds and worldings of young children in current times of intensified and unevenly distributed precarity. Rather than working with an already-known and universalized meaning of justice, the book powerfully illustrates how confronting the impacts of neoliberal capitalism, colonialism and human exceptionalism on 21st Century childhoods can occur through situated, socio-culturally attuned accounts that attend closely to the places and spaces of childhood becomings.”

Fikile Nxumalo, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education, University of Toronto

“This timely and evocative volume traces how historical, political, and developmental discourses continue to influence how we mobilize justice, equity, and care in the lives of young children across the globe. Through its analysis of research, policy, and practice, I was reminded that we (as adults) limit children’s capacity to act on their world(s), even in contemporary activist movements. In our effort to advocate for children’s rights, we potentially diminish their capacity to move along and with us as collaborators and contributors to a more just world. As authors argue, without new and expanded thinking on the most pressing social issues—(im)migration, emotional well-being, colonization, sustainability, neoliberal politics—we potentially reify the conditions that create inequitable systems and boundaries. That is, caring for children is not about protecting children or using them as props for our own political agendas, but deeply understanding their entanglement with adults, the material world, nonhuman creatures, and our global communities.”

Haeny S. Yoon, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Early Childhood Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Preface: Childhoods in More Just Worlds: An International Handbook
Gaile S. Cannella and Tim Kinard

Bodies, Beings, and Relations in More Just Worlds
1. The Reduction of Children to “Bare Life”: The Case of Child Migration
Michael O’Loughlin and Renata de Assis

2. “Forward to No Place at All”: Forceful Migration and Child Welfare
Mlado Ivanovic

3. A Romani Analysis of English Preschool Education
Mandy Pierlejewski and Gyula Vamosi

4. The Shadows and Silences of Colonialism: Resisting Eroding Realities for Māori Children Through Language Re-Vernacularisation in Antipodean New Zealand
Mere Skerrett

5. Staying with the Troubles of Colonised Emotional Well-Being of Young Children in Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Jenny Ritchie

6. Competing Discourses about Immigrant Children: Metaphors of the Right and Left
Theodora Lightfoot

Care and Education: Performing Just Childhood Worlds
7. Refusing Policymakers’ Manufactured Crisis: Countering Conceptions of School Readiness
Christopher P. Brown, David P. Barry, and Da Hei Ku

8. Politics of Childhoods: Paradoxical Moments of Be(com)ing
I-Fang Lee

9. Sitting With the Agency Paradox to Stand for Childhood Liberation: The Case of Critical Mathematics Education
José Martínez Hinestroza

10. “Your Children Are Having Too Much Fun”: Teaching Literacy With Radical Hope
Luz A. Murillo

11. Justice Mapping: Making Theoretical Kin With/in Childhood Studies
Tim Kinard

12. Becoming-with Water: Collaboration, Ethico-onto-epistemologies, Experimentations, and Creativity
Mindy Blaise and Claire O’Callaghan

13. Entanglements of Neoliberalism, Childhoods and Environmental Justice
Kylie Smith, Casey Myers, and Marek Tesar

Stir of Echoes: 20th-Century Childhoods in the 21st
14. Figurations of the Child in Swedish Early Childhood Education
Therese Lindgren

15. Innocence and Parenting in Difficult Times
Emily L. Murphy and Hannah Dyer

16. Playing With the Politics of Play
Sue Grieshaber and Sally Barnes

17. Becoming Convivial With Child: Dismantling the Race/Child/Learning/Human Assemblage
Maria Kromidas

About the Authors

Index

Timothy Kinard

Tim Kinard is an associate professor of early learning in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where his work as a researcher is entangled with his work as a teacher. A unique collaboration with the local, public school district in San Marcos has created a space where Tim and his colleagues engage with a community of practitioners, administrators, students and local families, while designing curricula and teaching with/in a public prekindergarten as engagement with complicated conversations about conquest and curriculum, theory and practice. This ongoing research collaboration and teaching opportunity were created to explore the promises and
perils of play-based, place-based, multilingual curriculum and pedagogy. Publications emerging from this collaboration have appeared in a range of journals including New Educator, Theory into Practice, Young Children and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, as well as in a book he co-authored with Jesse Gainer and Mary Esther Huerta, entitled Power Play: Explorando y Empujando Fronteras en Tejas, through theory building and storytelling in a multilingual play-based early learning curriculum.

Gaile S. Cannella

Gaile S. Cannella is an independent scholar who has served as a tenured Full Professor at Texas A&M University, College Station, and at Arizona State University, Tempe, as well as the Velma Schmidt Endowed Chair of Education at the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in a range of journals and volumes, including Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, and International Review of Qualitative Research. Her most recent books are: Critical Qualitative Research Reader (2012) with Shirley Steinberg; Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care and Education (second edition 2018) with Marianne Bloch and Beth Swadener; Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures (2015) with Michelle Pérez and Penny Pasque; and Critical Examinations of Quality in Childhood Education and Care (2016) with Michelle Pérez and I-Fang Lee. She is currently working on research projects that include: early years critical perspectives in education, and critical qualitative inquiry as public activisms and unthought imaginary. Dr. Cannella received the 2017 Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and Care Bloch Career Award.